96 who pay property taxes for schools they control see what they are getting; if they like it, they push to 'buy more,' and pass or tòlerate tax increases. If they don't like it, they will try to 'buy' less from government by pushing for a tax cut." This insistence that taxation be sim- pIe and politically accountable sounds very much in the spirit of the Ameri- can Revolution. The American Revo- lutionaries, Shlaes says, started a "con- versation" about taxes, and she sees her book as continuing that dialogue. Even her title, "The Greedy Hand," is taken from Thomas Paine. As Shlaes ex- plains her positions, however, it be- comes obvious that she is as misguided by the Tea Party fallacy as anyone else. What, for example, is so worrisome about the rise of the tax specialist? We rely on specialists in every aspect of modern life: to fix our cars and clean our teeth and debug our software and help us lower our high blood pressure. But that isn't a mark of the depersonal- ization of modern life; it's a sign of the intensely personalized nature of mod- ern life. If every person's car or every person's heart worked in exactly the same way, we wouldn't need mechanics and we wouldn't need doctors: there would be just one set of rules that everyone could follow. The same is true of the tax code. It is increasingly complicated because our lives are increasingly complicated-be- cause more of us now than ever before have more than one source of income, get divorced, move, have multiple in- vestments, own more than one house- and the tax code seeks to take account of that complexity. Shlaes is a fan of the flat tax. But if there was ever an impersonal tax the flat tax is it. At least the architects of the current income- tax system, whatever their flaws, have the decency to understand that taxes are not just the measure of what we ought to pay our government but also the measure of what, at the time we :file our return, we are capable of paying. Nor is it clear why property taxes are such "good" taxes, in the way that Shlaes makes them out to be. They may be locally administered, but, unlike income taxes, they are notoriously in- sensitive to the ups and downs of peo- pIe's lives. If you lose your job or retire, you may still pay the same property tax that you did when you were in your FllTlNG Her son had ordered suits that were extravagant for someone his age. He asked her to come along, to see the fabrics. High in the midtown building were chairs, gentlemen's magazines, loose bolts of cloth, even a kind of bar. She took coffee, sat in her sneakers. The boy went to a table where there were many beautiful ties. He touched one, held it up, smiled, then followed a fitter to an inner room. The owner chatted with the woman. A small man, with hair like white silk, he talked of his craft. She thought of Verrocchio-his time. The room grew rich with folds, shapes, curves, stitches, linings, buttons- centuries of the smell and architecture of men, centuries of kept skills, quieter, more venerable than the dressing of women. They said her son was read)!. Would she care to come and look? He asked her to see the basted pieces in the light: the thin cobalt line in the black, a rose thread woven in the gra)!. He wanted to be sure- they weren't too lavish, were they? peak earning years. More important, in an era, like ours, of increasing income segregation, the property tax starts to have the paradoxical effect of being the least burdensome on rich people and the most burdensome on poor people. Suppose, for instance, that a town of ten houses requires, for its annual bud- get, a hundred thousand dollars in local tax revenue. If the houses in the town are valued at a million dollars each, then a property tax of one per cent will raise the necessary funds. If the houses are valued at a hundred thousand dol- lars, however, then, for the town to sur- vive, the property-tax rate has to rise to ten per cent. This is an abstract ex- ample, but it is exactly what happened to many older American cities after the white middle class left them for the -SIRI VON REIS suburbs. A rich suburban community can provide very generous services with . very low property taxes, which in turn serves as a magnet for other well-off people. But as those people leave their old neighborhoods, and property val- ues fall there in consequence, the city has to raise property taxes even higher in order to provide the same level of services, which drives out even more middle-class people, and on and on in a downward spiral. It is no coincidence that New Haven, Connecticut, and Newark, New Jersey-two very poor towns that were ravaged by white flight in the nineteen-sixties and are sur- rounded today by much wealthier suburbs-have some of the highest property-tax rates in the country. Obviously, it is suicidal for troubled